Opportunities and Challenges of Including Landscape Benefits in Transmission Planning

Transmission planning has historically been driven by reliability, economics, and land avoidance-based policy – meaning planners exclude vast geographical areas from the planning process. However, a growing body of evidence suggests that there are a multitude of landscape-based benefits associated with electric transmission. The purpose of this work is to help planners, policy makers, and researchers better understand how landscape benefits might be included in transmission planning. The fundamental question this work seeks to answer is “what are the opportunities and challenges associated with including landscape benefits in transmission planning?”. Recent research shows that transmission rights-of-way have the potential to provide a broad range of benefits beyond those commonly recognized today such as reliability and economics. These additional benefits include habitat and pollinator support, recreation, wildfire risk reduction, stormwater and heat mitigation, and local economic opportunities. Recent policy changes, such as the Federal Energy Regulatory Committee’s Order 1920 that requires transmission planners to maximize the benefit of transmission projects, provide an opening to integrating non-traditional benefit accounting in formal transmission planning processes. This work identifies a broad range of potential landscape benefits in existing academic and industry literature. Furthermore, it initiates the process of developing conceptual frameworks for determining 1) how difficult specific landscape benefits are to measure with existing tools, data, and techniques, 2) what techniques are most appropriate for measuring landscape benefits, and 3) how landscape benefits might be combined with traditional metrics in industry-grade transmission planning tools.